Desiring the Known, Unknown, and Unknowable

Binaries are out … and yet, they insistently emerge in the very process of thinking. The recognition of a thing, a concept, or an experience immediately emerges as this and not that, clarifying a figure against a background, what it is and what it is not. In The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing and Belonging in Psychoanalysis, Galit Atlas attends to the mysteries of desire against a background of pragmatics, then brings the pragmatic to the fore, all in an attempt to speak of aspects of desire that usually elude our attention. Treating the binary as a dialectic, she counterposes and interweaves the tangible, ministering mother with the mysterious mother’s “unknown insides” (p. 1). Also rejecting hierarchy, she insists that the mystery of the preoedipal mother is both sexual and mature, always present and powerful in its own right, holding aspects of desire and sexuality alongside oedipal tensions, both of which include irreducible complexities. And she does not shy away from the ineffable, the ambiguous, the unknown, or even unknowable. In short, she proposes a binary that is clinically helpful.

This is a book that reaches toward the most difficult aspects of our work, and for this, it is cutting edge. Atlas seeks the negative, what is not said, the pauses and breathes between words in order to bring forward the neglected parts of multimodal communications between mother–infant, lovers, and patient–analyst. At the same time, she never fails to hold the tension between the visible and invisible, the lyrics among what is not said, and the touch around what is unexposed. The pragmatic ministering mother/analyst is always also the enigmatic, mysterious (m)other.

When reading Atlas, you can feel her strength, patience, and wisdom. There is literal evidence of these qualities as she deftly weaves theory in and out, all of it derived from a broad and eclectic range of psychoanalytic thinkers. Facile

with theorizing, she writes from the perspective of contemporary relational